Vendors and presenters from various eco-friendly groups, including Bullfrog Power, CO2 Reduction Edmonton and the local solar energy society, crammed into a lone tent in Hawrelak Park after a blizzard forced them to abandon their original locations.

Of course they could do valid research, but it would just be condemned as communist like the Global Warming science was in this very thread. Keep fighting those Commies, guys, one day the USSR will fall!

SLAAAM.

That was the sound of the door closing after any credibility you may have had left, left.

We can now ad Ad Hominem, Appeal to Emotion and Appeal to Ridicule to the Appeal to Popularity fallacy you made earlier.

Not one single person in this thread has stated Bush was NOT the worst President in history. What has been said was

(a) if you are living the events, you are not a fair judge of "history" in the making; time will tell the tale, and(b) your source, that hnn.us "data" is patently stupid on it's face.

I did a little "research" of my own this afternoon, and discovered that the hnn.us site gets roughly 46,000 hits per DAY.

They conducted that survey over 3 weeks, or 21 days. This equates to roughly 320,000 times the site was visited. Said another way, that's 320,000 times someone COULD have participated in the survey. Statistically speaking, that's called the "population."

109 people did.

That's called the "sample."

Their sample size is 0.03% of the population. Probably not too good.

Without the details of the survey itself in front of me, I cannot analyze the data as to predictive power of that 0.03%. We call this "Peer Review," and it is an essential part of the scientific process (ie, valid research) so we know someone is not trying to pull the wool over our eyes.

Questions I would ask the surveyors:

(1) How many "choices" did each respondent have for each question?(2) What was the actual distribution of responses, per question?

With this information, I could tell you what confidence you can have, scientifically speaking of course, in that 61%. Is it a "real" measure of what someone in the population would say, or is it hogwash?

Also, given the rhetoric of the remaining article, using phrases like "overwhelming consensus" think Bush is near the bottom are certainly suspect. 61%, especially without error data or standard deviations, cannot by any scientifically objective measure be considered "overwhelming consensus."

Sorry if actually looking at data and the way it is presented makes me look like a commie hunting, earth hating Evil Conservative. Last time I checked, thinking was not a crime.

"If there be any here who think these principles invalid, or would seek to overthrow our Republican form of government, let them stand forever undisturbed as a monument to the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated, where reason is left free to combat it."

Let's discuss points on the merits of the arguments, not trying to undermine the credibility of the person speaking, especially not with uncalled for comparisons. If you want to know what is often on my mind in big threads, with one or two people defending their opinion, this fits pretty well:

"The majority, oppressing an individual, is guilty of a crime, abuses its strength, and by acting on the law of the strongest breaks up the foundations of society." - Thomas Jefferson

Forums and debate thrive on different viewpoints. You have to throw it all in together and boil it down to see what, to you, encompasses the truth. I am glad we all don't agree, but let's keep the debate civil. There really is not any reason to start mud slinging, no matter where you are in the debate.

"Nanny state" and "government intrusion" are codewords attacking policies seen as socialism, which is why I went the commie route.

Even the EPA website states: The term climate change is often used interchangeably with the term global warming, but according to the National Academy of Sciences, "the phrase 'climate change' is growing in preferred use to 'global warming' because it helps convey that there are [other] changes in addition to rising temperatures."

Anyone who things global warming will result in increased temperatures across the board isn't bothering to get informed about the issue. The one small small so small piece of science that The Day After Tomorrow got right was that the increases in temperature will alter wind current patterns. This won't result in a new ICE AGE or hilarious CGI mammoths voiced by Ray Romano, but will mean some areas will get cooler while others get hotter. The greatest concern isn't even with air currents, it is with the ocean, ocean currents, ocean temperatures, carbon saturation (via CO3) leading to acidification of the ocean, and massive loss of ocean diversity (bleaching of corals, collapse of coral ecosystems, jellyfish and squids outcompeteing native fish species.) With fish an important source of protein in cultures throughout the world and many fisheries in danger of collapse through overfishing without factoring in altering climate data, broad global repercussions could be at hand. Even small increases in ocean levels are doom for small island nations, Floridian beachfront property, and many beaches. Maybe people should invest in dike-building companies.

The past winter was cooler than normal (in the US), but not cool enough to counter the previous two decades. Even if the next winter is also cooler as is projected, they are still not out of bounds for a continual trend of increasing global temperature. There were temperature drops in other years but that didn't stop 2005 from being the warmest year on record. 2007 still managed to tie 1998 as second warmest, but then that's NASA saying so: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2007/ and I'm just some dude on the internet. Be sure to check out the part on Solar irradiance and how we're on the bottom of a cycle where we'll be going up soon.

There is not scientific debate on if global warming is real. There is no scientific debate on if man is causing global warming. The debate is on how much is man causing, and what can be done. The debaters are climatologists, geologists, meteorologists, ecologists, biologists, and others who deal with the alteration of temperatures affecting their study systems. If someone came up with an alternate reason for the current temperature changes that made scientific sense it would create a debate. Nothing has come along, despite what a few people funded by a few shady organizations want you to think. And it is not a conspiracy, we're dealing with people who spent ten years arguing on optimum sizes of nature conservatories. If something credible showed up it would be heard.

Scafetta is on the Physics Faculty of Duke University and West is a Chief Scientist at the US Army Research Office.

I quote the article:

Quote

Thus the average global temperature record presents secular patterns of 22- and 11-year cycles and a short timescale fluctuation signature...both of which appear to be induced by solar dynamics....If climate is as sensitive to solar changes as the above phenomenological findings suggest, the current anthropogenic contribution is significantly overestimated. We estimate that the Sun could account for as much as 69% of the increase in Earth's average temperature, depending on the [total solar irradiance] model used.

I further offer the petition signed by over 20,000 Ph.D. research scientists urging better and more complete research before long reaching policy decisions are made.

The idea of "consensus" in the scientific community as to the anthropogenic causes of ANY climate change are a myth. The debate is there.

I further offer the petition signed by over 20,000 Ph.D. research scientists urging better and more complete research before long reaching policy decisions are made.

The idea of "consensus" in the scientific community as to the anthropogenic causes of ANY climate change are a myth. The debate is there.

The Oregon petition is a fraud. It was sent in 1998 as a bulk emailing to thousands of scientists, carrying a "paper" authored by Arthur B. Robinson and three other people titled "Environmental Effects of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide" and was printed to look like it was an article from the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) The NAS never heard of Arthur Robinson until scientists called them asking "WTF?" Arthur Robinson is a biochemist (not a climatologist) and the paper was not peer reviewed anywhere, nor accepted for publication anywhere except by Robinson himself by his own Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, founded and headed by Arthur Robinson. Robinson has declared Ozone depletion a hoax, self-published a book called Nuclear War Survival Skills (which says "the dangers from nuclear weapons have been distorted and exaggerated), and told people it was safe to drink Chernobyl-irradiated water in OISM newsletters. Fellow authors on the paper include Zachary Robinson (22 year old home-schooled son of Arthur) and two astrophysicists, Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon. The NAS issued a rebuke of the paper, but not before 14,000 people had signed the attached petition. The OISM website allowed further people to sign up, leading to the 20,000 number. This number includes such well-respected people as Drs. Frank Burns, B. J. Honeycutt, and Benjamin Pierce (who you may recall from a TV show), Michael J Fox, someone named Dr. Red Wine, and Geraldine Halliwell (aka Ginger Spice - who was listed as a biologist!) Obviously they have a very tight screening process. Most names cannot be verified as even existing because they are nothing but names with no other information or credentials. When pressed, Arthur Robinson admitted only 2,100 signatures are people who identified themselves as physicists, geophysicists, climatologists, or meteorologists. (Read the book Trust us, we're Experts for a more-detailed analysis on why this petition is the junkiest of junk)

But please keep using this 1998 petition as evidence of a 2008 controversy!

In 1974 the scare was Global Cooling, then it was acid rain, then it was the hole in the ozone, then it was Y2K, now it's global warming, give it another 10 or 20 years and we'll have a shiny new CRISIS to confront. Maybe continental drift or the fact that every year the moon moves about 1" further away from the earth, maybe it'll be polar shift ... but I assure Global Warming will be old news and there will be a new crisis that mush be address and corrected right freakin' now at great cost.

You throw enough money at something you'll either fix it or people will loose interest and they'll find a new cause.

There is no debate among scientists. The actual global warming debates are on the issues I mentioned previously. Dismissing it with a wave of the hand and the classic Global Cooling chestnut will not change anything.

(1) You must have never heard of McIntyre and McKitrick and how they completely debunked the Mann Hockey Stick? Following their initial debunking, the Hockey Stick has further been challenged by the Chair of the NSF's Statistical Sciences Committee. Read about that here (pdf).

(2) Did you dismiss the 2008 article in Physics Today that I cited?

Are respected scientists who publish data in the official publication of the American Physical Society frauds, too?

(3) How about the big list of articles outlined on the Junk Science web site? Are all of those researchers frauds as well? Be sure to check out this page for contemporary data and discussion.

(4) Check out some of the quotes on this page. I particularly like the one by William Gray, who, around 2003 or so changed his prediction models to incorporate everything that is "known" about climate modeling with AGW, and since then his prediction errors have been well over 100% (prior to that his numbers were on par with NOAA's).

Admittedly, some of these quotes are aged. But taken as a collection, they show the process of how this issue has been politicized in a very dangerous way.

(5) Finally, here's a good read very specifically called the Climate Skeptic and it is NOT a lay site.

I quote:

"In 2007, the IPCC released its new climate report, and the hockey stick, which was the centerpiece bombshell of the 2001 report, and which was the “consensus” reconstruction of this “settled” science, can hardly be found."

The bottom line is that there is no consensus. You say there is no debate, but there is. There is very clearly debate going on...or attempted. As Gray said a decade ago, "I've been critical of global warming and am persona non grata."

I respect what you have to say ulthar and you're certainly entitled to your opinions and to point out things that you may or may not agree with, but it always seems like you live to contradict people here.

Interesting construction, Ash. Just about ANY reply I make proves your point.

It is my firm belief that there is a difference between facts and opinions. The pattern of discussion in our culture has evolved to a point that attempts to blur that very important line. I hope that if I ever tell anyone their opinions are wrong that people call me to the carpet on it.